Chopin and George Sand in Valldemossa

They came here on 15 December 1838 because they'd been kicked out of their lodgings near Palma. News had spread of Chopin's tuberculosis - a condition which Sand, his lover and devoted carer, refused to believe - and when the rains came, water had poured into the sick room. The 14th century charterhouse in Valldemossa had recently been de-monked and turned over to the authorities during the civil war which had left Mallorca in turmoil; it would offer them isolation, peace and a better climate in the Tramuntana mountains.

The Mallorcan sojourn was not going so well, and Sand's anti-clerical stance, along with the fact that she dressed herself and her daughter in men's/boys clothes and smoked cigars, alienated them from the local populace. Chopin's worsening condition and the wretched weather meant they left after 59 days in Valldemossa. Sand's account of a very mixed time,  A Winter in Mallorca, has been pilloried for her high-handedness and mockery of the island people, but I love its spirit and energy. Discussing the destroyed Dominican Monastery in Palma, she rails against the horrors of the Inquisition carried out there, and she is scathing about the Catholic cult of Valldemossa's holy girl Catalina Tomás, whose chapel we came across when we walked around the lower town (the plaques marking the stations of the cross around it are on houses in showcase condition, though we saw no-one apart from a couple of old ladies visiting the shrine and a singular cat - see lower down).

At no time has the Roman Church refused to honour in the Heavenly Kingdom the humblest children of the people, but times have come where she has condemned and rejected those of her apostles who try to improved their existence in this earthly kingdom. The pagesa [peasant girl] Catalina was obedient, poor, chaste and humble; but the Valldemossan pagès have profited so little from her example, and understood so little of her life, that one day they tried to stone my children, for they regarded as desecration the fact that my son was sketching the ruin of the Charterhouse. They behaved exactly like the Church, with one hand they kindled the auto-da-fé pyres, and with the other hand they burned incense before the effigies of her saints.

George's 15-year-old son Maurice has left very flavoursome pictorial documents of that time - there's a reproduction of one in the cell-museum which I hadn't seen before, of Chopin, mama and the children being informed by the Valldemossa priest about the nature of snow (as if we didn't know, Maurice wryly adds).

Having read tales of rival claims to 'the Chopin/Sand cell' from the monastery proper and Chopinesque competition, I was dubious about the gaudy claims outside to the 'real' lodgings, for which you have to pay separately. But it seems that 'Celda No. 4' is the right one, and since it had the Pleyel piano shipped from France which arrived rather late in their sojourn there, it had to be seen. And I was glad I took the plunge. What they don't publicise is the beauty of the garden terrace and one of those views which, Sand wrote, 'completely overwhelm one, for it leaves nothing to be desired and nothing to the imagination. All that a poet or painter might dream of, Nature has created here'.

The 'cell' is not as austere as you might imagine, even though Chopin compared his room to a tall, upright coffin with vaulting. Approached - the entrance is along from the cloister gateway -

via a lugubrious passageway

and heralded with various letterings - I've cut out the gaudy gold proclamation above here -

it's a suite of three rooms, all with windows and doors giving out on to the terrace.

There are facsimiles of Chopin's manuscript for the Preludes and original letters concerning the procurement and delivery of the Pleyel, and yes, there is the piano itself.

Until it arrived, Chopin allegedly played and composed on a specially constructed Mallorcan pianino, which if Paul Kildea is correct in his recent book on the subject, passed into the hands of Wanda Landowska. What he composed on which piano is never going to be known, but it is certain that some of his darkest inspirations were penned there, spooked as he so seriously was by his surroundings: the central juggernaut of  the D flat major Prelude, nicknamed "Raindrop" because of its incessant A flats turning into G sharps in the middle section; the wild outburst which shatters the trotting composure of the F minor Ballade; and the C sharp minor Scherzo.

We got to Valldemossa in little more than half an hour on a morning bus from Palma. Our host at the Bar-Ristorante es Roquessar in the main square told us that the week before Christmas was unnaturally quiet this year, and that there was no point in staying open of an evening. This was the equal-first-best meal we had in Mallorca - alongside those in our Palma regular, l' ambigú - and we spent longer than planned just sitting watching the sporadic activity in the square (a kid playing delightedly with the leaves dancing in the wind, a couple that swept through photographing everything, an ugly and persistent cat with a very odd meow). Mostly, though, it was deserted. This is the view across to the restaurant from the entrance to the cell-museum.

J wasn't going to see the cell, but once I'd been I insisted he did, which gave me another 20 minutes sitting in the late afternoon sun.

After that we wandered down to the lower part of town,

conversed with a very leonine cat by the chapel to Catalina.

peered down various alleys giving views to the verdant hills beyond

and I took a bigger loop around because I wanted to see the monastery terraces from below (hence the lead picture here). The next day was marked out for Deia, 20 minutes further on by bus, and that offered wonders of another sort, to be chronicled anon.

Chopin list

On the stage of Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet in June 1909 were Vaslav Nijinsky in a rather unbecoming orangey-blond wig and attendant ethereal creatures including Tamara Karsavina and Alicia Pavlova. Down in the pit the orchestra played the joint creative input of six musical minds, colliding in a pretty mélange of sorts. Since three of them – Chopin, Stravinsky and Glazunov – are to meet in the Royal Ballet’s triple bill of A Month in the Country, A Birthday Offering and Les noces next month, and I needed to knit them together somehow in a programme article, the premiere of Les sylphides seemed like a very good place to start.

Digging out the whys and wherefores made me realize what a complex musical history this more or less plotless ballet, with its romantic poet flanked by long-tutued sylphs, has had. Not only does it tend to be most often performed, when it is performed at all, in Roy Douglas’s arrangement, but since the Russians other orchestrators have included Maurice Ravel in 1914* and Benjamin Britten, in a 1940 effort for an American ballet company sadly lost (and the editors of Britten’s letters must be believed on this, rather than Richard Taruskin, who claims the orchestration to be ‘in current use’. I wish it were).

So I thought as a kind of fridge-magnet memo to self I would attempt as un-drily as I could to list the path to the 1909 Les sylphides. Volume One of Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions was a huge help, with detail from Lynn Garafola’s Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Glazunov kicked off in 1892 with his orchestral suite Chopiniana, presumably inspired by what Tchaikovsky had done with Mozart piano pieces + the motet ‘Ave verum corpus’ Lisztified in his Suite No. 4. The four pieces in Chopiniana – none of them, note, used in Les sylphides – were the 'Military' Polonaise, Op. 40 No. 1; the Nocturne in F, Op. 15 No. 1; the Mazurka in C sharp minor, Op. 50 No. 3;  and the Tarantelle, Op. 43.

In 1907 Mikhail Fokine – pictured above two years earlier in costume for Paquita – choreographed Chopiniana for the Mariinsky. He asked Glazunov to make an additional orchestration of the C sharp minor Waltz, Op. 64 No. 2 with a bit of the Op. 25 No. 7 Etude to preface it. The waltz did of course survive into the Diaghilev-managed Les sylphides.

Chopiniana the ballet showcased national as well as classical dances – Warsaw ballroom style for the Polonaise, Capri-based folk dance for the Tarantella. That had little in common with Les sylphides. But the music and choreography for Fokine’s second Chopiniana ballet, entitled Grand Pas to Music by Chopin, certainly did. This retained only the C sharp minor Waltz and placed it alongside the six other numbers we know from Les sylphides (I'm getting opus fatigue now, and I'm sure you are, so we'll leave it at that until Stravinsky's contribution pops up).

 When Diaghilev turned to ‘the second Chopiniana’ for his Ballets Russes’ first appearance in the Parisian ‘Saison Russe’ of 1909, he clearly didn’t think much of its arrangements other than Glazunov’s; the rest had been hastily done by a répétiteur at the Mariinsky, Maurice Keller. So Diaghilev turned to Lyadov, Taneyev, Nikolay Tcherepnin and...the 26 year old Igor Stravinsky, who at the beginning of 1909 impressed him with his orchestral showpiece the Scherzo fantastique. I’ve not been able to trace the other arrangements, but Stravinsky’s not especially flavoursome yet historically fascinating versions of the Nocturne in A flat, Op. 32. No. 2 and the Grande Valse brillante, Op. 28 appear in rather poor sound – and with visuals you fortunately don't need to watch – via a performance from Sakari Oramo and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Don't ask me why there's a snippet of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto at the start, but don't readjust your sets - it quickly vanishes.

Which provides an excuse very belatedly to congratulate Oramo on his appointment as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, taking up the baton in September. That fabulous Bax/Saariaho/Sibelius concert which was definitely one of the highs of 2011 clearly had its impact - and looking back at the associated blog post, I see there was speculation in the comments about who would take over the reins at the BBCSO. One thing I didn't know at the time was that it was the first occasion on which Oramo had conducted a London orchestra.

And while sounding the BBC note, fullish details of the works at the 2012 Proms (though minus artists) are here on the Arts Desk and here on the BBC Proms website, less easy to take in at once. All I’ll say is that there must be something there to satisfy everyone, and that if another Beethoven symphonies cycle would usually send me diving for cover, the fact that it comes from Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a real coup for the world's biggest music festival.

*this added in the light of Shin-ichi Numabe's comment below.

An Olympian in the Alps

I've turned Schubert-crazy again. As with Wagner, the mania comes and goes in waves. It all started with The Greatest Piano Recital I've Ever Heard, Richter's at Chichester Cathedral in March 1989, when he took an hypnotic half-hour over the first movement of the G major Sonata (D894). Then I hunted out all his recordings of the sonatas, and found his heavenly length the only way I wanted to hear Schubert. Now his one-time duo partner and protegee Elisabeth Leonskaja has come out from under the Richter shadow and forged her own great interpretations. And it's the palmy days of Richter all over again, though with a very different musical personality at the helm.


At Verbier high in the Alps, where I've just been privileged to spend three and a half music-and-walking-packed days, Leonskaja is currently working her way through the complete Schubert sonatas - half of them for the first time ever, as she told me in an interview which will appear probably around the time of her return to London to play D894 later this year. She clearly had as much smiling affection as I did for the first of the three late-night programmes I was privileged to hear in the vast temporary construction of the Salle des Combins. There, having moved from an apparently disastrous encounter with a poor piano and rough acoustics in the Verbier Cinema, she played the Sonata in B major, D575, and the unusual five-movement E major, D459. Hardly a couple of bars pass without Schubert revealing his own lovable, harmonically wayward personality, and you can rarely predict the progress of a melody (the third movement of D459 struck me forcibly in this respect).

So what is it that makes Leonskaja's Schubert so special? I came late to her extraordinarily deep and thoughtful concert-hall approach - music as a sacred rite - with the second half of her Chopin recital late last year. Here, it seemed, the range was extended. She can indeed be as Olympian as Schubert himself (her word for the opening movement of D850), with that fabulously weighted full sonority; but she catches the essence of his ability to leap from the thunderously epic to the intimately lyric. So we ranged - forgive the corny images prompted purely by a desire to put up a couple of Verbier snaps - from the babbling, high-altitude brook of D850's delicious finale


to the forbidding heights, glaciers and cataracts that disrupt the ineffable slow movement and finale of D959 (a performance which brought an instant standing ovation, as the colossal D major Sonata should have done the previous evening).


The articulation is phenomenal, the emotional commitment total. And the stern, concentrated figure on the platform is in extraordinary contrast to the vivacious, humorous woman you meet offstage - though one thing, a great humanity, connects the two.

And for now I'd better stop waxing lyrical, return to Verbier another day (due for a big Arts Desk piece on Sunday) and just count myself lucky to have heard great pianism in hugely contrasting styles, from Lewis and Pires at the Albert Hall on Wednesday to the 18 year old Kit Armstrong pouring forth musicality and playfulness in a Verbier trio concert and, of course, Leonskaja magisterially at the heart of it all.

Backstage at St Paul's

The higher the church, it seems, the more all they say and do is theatre. So it did feel like going behind the wings on Saturday when, in honour of goddaughter Evi's latest state visit, friend and succentor Father Andrew took us into the hidden places of Wren's vast masterpiece. We started at William Kempster's geometrical staircase in the south-west tower, where a Gormley has recently been unveiled



and then toured the storage spaces on the same level as the whispering gallery. Plans are to turn this into a museum, though I like its spooky improvised air. Here's masonry from old St Paul's which fell, according to John Evelyn, 'like grenados' in the Great Fire of 1666, 'the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness'.


Sitting idle are the massive marble font cover and two pulpits, this one regarded as too Romish.


The second, and favourite, of Wren's three models for the new cathedral, which cost the price of a small townhouse to make, is still to be seen in the Trophy Room, along with a splendid series of drawings.


To move from the south storage space to the north, you cross the west end on a level with the organ trumpets


and get a good look at some of the glorious stonework.


Then it was time for Evensong, where we sat in splendour under the Gibbons woodwork while the men's voices of the cathedral choir treated us to Matthew Locke's expressive setting of Psalm 102(Purcell's 'Hear my prayer', though, has to be the apogee of chromatic grief, one of the most perfect anthems ever written). Don't miss the free St Paul's performance of Bach's St John Passion with the London Mozart Players on Wednesday 24 March.


Anyway, if that wasn't enough to set Evi's head spinning, we whizzed up to Kings Place for the eighth concert in Martino Tirimo's series presenting the complete Chopin - a real epic in two parts, each taking us on a long journey from innocence to experience, which I'm pleased to have given some much-needed coverage in my Arts Desk review. Afterwards, Tirimo's fellow Cypriot Niki Katsaouni wanted us to meet her thoughtful and modest compatriot. Here he is with Evi in front of one of Norman Cornish's scenes of colliery drinkers.


The Cornish exhibition is a treat for the interval. Cornish laboured down the pit for 33 years before putting his art first. His work is a record of a vanished community, but much more than that in its wonderful compositions. I especially coveted a frontal drinking scene with pints lined up on the bar - not for sale, but many of the works are, around the £10,000 mark. Go have a look, anyway.

Cabbages and kings

Or rather, onions and emperors...



all in last Thursday's stately progress from Borough Market via the British Library to Ivan Fischer's exhilarating performance of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Food and drink first: that little row of trendy eateries on the edge of the expensive but still unique Borough Market which so appeals to us BoBos (= Bohemian Bourgeois; it could equally well be BohBous). Second only to St John, where we took my blogging New Best Friend Will and his partner Laurent after a Barbican concert for pig's spleen, snails and Eccles cakes, is the Wright Brothers Port and Oyster Bar. It was full up on a Thursday lunchtime, however, so we found a pure Boh organic burger space along the same street where we sat in the semi cold and watched life passing like that seasons-alter scene in Notting Hill. Then to two-thirds of the usual ritual: a cake from Conditorei and Cook, a latte (J's; mine is an espresso but doesn't photograph so picturesquely) at the Monmouth Coffee Company.


Next I became a snapping tourist in the market. Couldn't resist reminders that somewhere in Kent, albeit forcibly, something - rhubarb - is growing


and there are plenty of fish in the sea, as yet


though probably not this one, not in these waters, at any rate.


I've already waxed about the Alice cases at the British Library. But we also stumbled across a cast of Chopin's hand


and, only connect, moved from daguerreotypes, of which this portrait of a none too happy looking Chopin shortly before his death is one of the earliest,


to the photography exhibition. Although I've been to Lacock Abbey, I'd forgotten how artistic a picture-taker was Fox Talbot. I especially love this homage to a Dutch domestic scene, captured at Lacock.


After killing time in bookshops and cafes, we slumped in the RFH and wandered over to the QEH for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment's latest instalment in their Beethoven cycle, this time with the inspiring, always unpredictable Ivan Fischer (photo by Marco Borggreve).


The Second Symphony had its surprises - the wild coda of the first movement, which given this band's shock of the new, one could understand first-time listeners being discomforted by; and the way Fischer turned the last of the slow movement's clutch of themes into a bouncing little Landler. But of course it was the Eroica which was bound to astonish.


The Funeral March became a private utterance, with overheard upbeats from the splendid double-basses led by the ever-expressive Chi-Chi Nwanoku; and I think I found loveliest of all that moment in the Prometheus variations when the tune very briefly turns bucolic after a patch of turbulence. The horns held fast, and of course produced a sound no modern equivalent can match; besides, the valveless originals give a competely different meaning to Beethoven's line and choice of strong/weak notes.

There are, of course, heaven-storming sounds you don't get with a period-instrument band, but by way of compensation how much colour can be shifted in a single chord. And it was all as invigorating as I'd hoped, my mood having been occluded by personal grief and a harrowing sit through Maw's Sophie's Choice on DVD (which does work for me, ultimately, in the last act, touched by grace). I'd wanted more of the same brio on Saturday from the BBCSO/Minkowski Pergolesi and Stravinsky double bill, found myself exiled to the Bavarian RSO/Jansons concert but discovered it to be equally uplifting, thanks to Mariss's dancing mobility and a rather unusual, buoyant view of Shostakovich Ten, duly noted in detail in my Arts Desk review. And, yes, the BRSO IS one of the world's best orchestras, no doubt about that.